Faculty

Stephen Mamber

Professor; Vice Chair, Cinema and Media Studies

Stephen Mamber is a professor in the Cinema and Media Studies Program of the Department of Film, Television and Digital Media. His digital media courses include the seminars Issues in Electronic Culture, Computer Applications for Film Studies and Videogame Theory. His film courses include classes on narrative theory, visual analysis, and directors and genres, among others.

Mamber is the author of the iPad app ClipNotes, which has been available in the App Store since November 2012. ClipNotes is a way to help retrieve pre-selected segments of any film or video and show them together with your descriptions while the segments are showing. It’s useful for individual study, teaching or presentation. ClipNotes for Windows became available in November 2013 and recently received an Editor's Pick Award from BestWindows8apps.net.

Mamber’s Who Shot Liberty Valance? is now available as a free iPad app in the iTunes App Store. The app is an experimental study of the classic 1962 John Ford film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and advances an argument about new ways to consider it. The app includes opportunities to simultaneously explore selected key segments, as well as some magnified views, 3D models and diagrams. Annotated selections from 50 years of scholarly writing about the film are also included. Based on the web site of the same name, this new version is redesigned and programmed as a completely standalone app. It works on any iPad with a retina display (iPad 3 or newer and current iPad mini). Links to the apps are available below.

Mamber has been active in the digital media arena for several decades. He started out writing a variety of tools and applications, principally exploring the possibilities of using digital media for film analysis, and has gone on to design multimedia applications and web sites. He has been a visiting research scientist at the IBM T.J. Watson Center in New York and has served as a National IBM Consulting Scholar. His work has been supported by a MacArthur Foundation grant and by the Intel Research Council.

His publications include Cinema Verite in America: Studies in Uncontrolled Documentary (MIT Press), as well as numerous articles and chapters on film and new media subjects. He has also been the editor of Cinema magazine, and is a recipient of an Associated Press Golden Mike Award for his film criticism on Pacifica Radio.

Mamber’s current activities outside the classroom include developing video database applications; experimenting with single-board microcontroller Arduino and other electronic devices for use in multimedia projects; and creating video-related apps for iOS devices and other platforms.

In addition to teaching at UCLA TFT, Mamber has taught at Georgia Institute of Technology’s School of Literature, Communication, and Culture; in the Interactive Media Program at the University of Southern California, and at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. He has also been an adjunct faculty member at the Centre for Digital Media in Vancouver and taught several online courses there.

Mamber received his undergraduate degree from UC Berkeley, where he double majored in mathematics and dramatic art. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Southern California. Additionally, he was a Fellow at the American Film Institute Center for Advanced Film Studies. He was a founding member of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association.